Wake w-1

by Robert J. Sawyer

  “Well,” said Kuroda, “this may sound crazy, but I think they’re cellular automata.”

  “Who in the what now?”

  “Hey, I thought you were the daughter of a physicist,” he said, but his tone was one of gentle teasing.

  She smiled. “Sue me. And besides, if they’re cellular, I’d need to be a biologist’s daughter, no?”

  “No, no — they’re not biological cells; they’re cells in the computer-science sense of the word: a cell is the basic unit of storage in computer memory, holding a single unit of information.”

  “Ah.”

  “And an automaton is something that behaves or responds in a predictable, mechanical way. So cellular automata are patterns of information units that respond in a specific way to changes in their surroundings. For example, take a grid of black and white squares — each square is a cell, okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “And on a chessboard that goes on forever, each square has eight neighbors, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Well, suppose you say to each square something like, okay, if you’re already black and three or more of your neighbors are white, then turn white yourself. An instruction like that is called a rule. And if you keep applying the rule over and over again, strange things happen. I mean, yes, if you just focus on one individual square, all you’d see is it flipping back and forth between black and white. But if you look at the overall grid, patterns of squares can seem to move across it — cross shapes, maybe, or hollow squares, or L shapes like we have here, or clusters of cells that change shape in set stages and, after a fixed number of steps, return to their original shape, but have moved somewhere else in the process. It’s almost as though the shapes are alive.”

  She heard the chair groan as he shifted in it.

  “I remember when I first encountered cellular automata in Conway’s Game of Life as an undergrad,” he said. “What’s fascinating about all this is that they’re representations of data that are interpreted as being special by an observer. I mean, those L-shaped things — they’re called ‘spaceships,’ by the way, these patterns that retain their cohesion and fly across the grid — well, spaceships don’t really exist; nothing is actually moving and the spaceship you see on the right side of the grid is completely different in composition from the one you originally saw on the left side. And yet we think of it as the same one.”

  “But what are they for?”

  “Besides making undergrads go ‘ooooh,’ you mean?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, in nature—”

  “These occur in nature?”

  “Yes, in lots of places. For instance, there’s a kind of snail that makes the pattern on its shell in direct response to a cellular-automata rule.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. It has a row of spigots that spit out pigment, or not, based on what the neighboring spigots on either side are doing.”

  “Cool!”

  “Yes, it is. But what’s really cool is that there are cellular automata in brains.”

  “Really?” she said again.

  “Well, they’re in lots of kinds of cells, actually. But they’ve been studied particularly in neural tissue. The cytoskeletons of cells — their internal scaffolding — is made up of long strings called microtubules, and each component of a microtubule, a little piece of protein called a tubulin dimer, can be in one of two states. And those states go through permutations as though they were cellular automata.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “No one knows. Some people, though, including — hey, maybe your father knows him? Roger Penrose? He’s a famous physicist, too, and he and his associate, a guy named Hameroff, think that those cellular automata are the actual cause of consciousness, of self-awareness.”

  “Sweet! But why?”

  “Well, Hameroff is an anesthesiologist, and he’s shown that when people are put under for surgery their tubulin dimers fall into a neutral state — instead of some being black, say, and some being white, they all sort of become gray. When they do that, consciousness goes off; when they start behaving as cellular automata again, consciousness comes back on.”

  She made a mental note to Google this later. “But if the snail has spigots, and the brain has these whatchamacallits—”

  “Tubulin dimers,” said Kuroda.

  “Okay, well if these tubulin dimers are the actual things that are flipping in the brain, what’s flipping in the background of webspace?”

  She imagined him shrugging; it would have gone naturally with his tone of voice. “Bits, I guess. You know: binary digits. By definition, they’re either on or off, or one or zero, or black or white, or however you want to visualize them. And maybe you’re visualizing them as squares of two different colors, just at the limit of your mental resolution.”

  “But, um, the Web is supposed to pass on data unchanged,” she said. “A browser asks for a Web page, and an exact copy of it is sent from the server that hosts that page. There shouldn’t be any data changing.”

  “No,” he said. “That’s puzzling.”

  They sat in silence for a few moments, contemplating this. And then she heard her mother’s distinctive footsteps on the stairs, followed by her saying, “Hey, you two, anyone care for a mid-morning snack?”

  Kuroda’s chair squeaked again as he heaved his bulk up from it. “I always think better on a full stomach.”

  You must do a lot of thinking, Caitlin thought, and she smiled as they went upstairs.

  Chapter 27

  As soon as Shoshana arrived at the Marcuse Institute on Saturday morning, she, Dillon, and the Silverback headed over to the island. Hobo was inside the gazebo, leaning against one of the wooden beams that made up its frame.

  Hello, Hobo, signed Marcuse once they were all inside. His fingers were fat and some signs were a struggle for him.

  Hello, doctor, Hobo signed back. Marcuse was the only one who required the ape to call him by an honorific instead of his first name. Still, it wasn’t as bad as William Lemmon, the ultimate supervisor of Roger Fouts’s work with Washoe in the 1970s; Lemmon used to make Washoe and his other ape charges kiss his ring when he arrived, as if he were pope of the chimps.

  Picture of Shoshana good, Marcuse signed.

  Hobo grinned, showing teeth. Hobo paint! Hobo paint!

  Yes. Now will you paint … His hands froze in midair, and Shoshana wondered if he’d decided that he didn’t want to see himself caricatured by an ape. After a moment, he began signing again: Dillon?

  Hobo turned an appraising set of eyes on the young grad student with the scraggly blond beard; he was wearing a black T-shirt and black jeans, which, Shoshana hoped, weren’t the same ones as yesterday. Maybe … maybe…

  Dillon looked surprised to be conscripted for this duty, but he moved over to one of the two stools in the gazebo, sat on it, and struck a pose like Rodin’s Thinker. Shoshana smiled at the sight.

  But Hobo threw his hands up over his head, made a pant-hoot, and ran on all fours out the gazebo’s door. Shoshana looked at Marcuse for permission, he nodded, and she took off after the ape, who was now cowering behind the yellow stone statue of the Lawgiver.

  What’s wrong? Shoshana asked. She held her arms out to gather Hobo in a hug. What’s wrong?

  Hobo looked back up at the gazebo, then at Shoshana. No people. No watch, he signed. There weren’t many things he was self-conscious about; indeed, it had taken a lot to convince him not to masturbate or defecate in front of visiting dignitaries. But his art was something he was uneasy about, at least while it was being created.

  We go away, you paint Dillon?

  Hobo was quiet for a moment. Paint Shoshana.

  Again? Why?

  Shoshana pretty.

  She felt herself blushing.

  Shoshana have ponytail, added Hobo.

  She knew that getting him to paint someone other than her would be better. Otherwise, critics would argue that he’d just stumble
d on a random combination of shapes that Marcuse, et al., had decided represented Shoshana, and he simply reproduced those same fixed shapes over and over again to get a reward — not unlike half the cartoonists in the world, Shoshana thought; the guy who drew The Family Circus seemed to have a repertoire of about eight things.

  Fine, she signed. Paint me, then Dillon, okay?

  Shoshana knew she was out-thinking the poor ape; he could, of course, paint her regardless of what she said. After a moment, he signed, Yes yes.

  She held out her hand and he took it, intertwining his fingers with hers. They walked back up to the gazebo, the hot morning sun beating down on them.

  “Hobo is going to paint another picture of me,” Shoshana announced once they’d passed through the screen door. Marcuse frowned. She switched to signing so Hobo could follow along. And after, Hobo will paint Dillon — right, Hobo?

  Hobo lifted his shoulders. Maybe.

  “All right,” Shoshana said, “everybody out, please. You know he doesn’t like an audience.”

  Marcuse didn’t seem happy about taking orders from a subordinate, but he followed Dillon outside. Shoshana looked around the gazebo, double-checking that the additional cameras they’d set up last night could clearly see both Hobo and his canvas. Then she headed for the door, too. As she exited she glanced back, and, to her astonishment, saw Hobo stretching his long arms out in front of him, with fingers interlocked, as if warming up.

  And then the artist got down to work.

  * * *

  That special point! How wondrous, but how frustrating, too!

  The datastream from it didn’t always follow the same path, but it did always end up at the same location — and so I took to intercepting the datastream just before it arrived there.

  There had been no repetition of the intriguing bright flashes, and for a long time there was nothing at all I could make sense of in the data pouring forth from that point. But now the datastream had become a reflection of me again. How strange, though! Instead of the constantly changing perspective I’d grown used to, the datastream seemed to focus for extended periods on just a very small portion of reality and … and something was distorted about the passage of time, it seemed. I tried to fathom the significance, if any, of that tiny part of the universe, but then, maddeningly, the datastream turned to gibberish once more…

  * * *

  After they’d finished the snack — which turned out to be oatmeal cookies her mom had gotten from the Mennonites — Caitlin and Dr. Kuroda returned to the basement. Caitlin had switched her eyePod to simplex mode for the break, but now had it back in duplex and was looking again at webspace.

  “Okay,” said Kuroda, settling into his chair, “we’ve got a background to the Web made up of cellular automata — but what exactly are the cells? I mean, even if they’re just single bits, they still have to come from somewhere.”

  “Slack storage space?” suggested Caitlin. Hard drives store data in clusters of a fixed size, she knew; the new computer her dad had bought yesterday probably had an NTFS-formatted drive, meaning it used clusters of four kilobytes, and if a file contained only three kilobytes of data, the fourth kilobyte — over eight thousand bits — was left unused.

  “No, I don’t think so,” said Kuroda. “Nothing can read or write to that space; even if there was some way for Web protocols to access slack space on servers, you wouldn’t see bits flipping rapidly. No, this must be something out there — something in the data pipes.” He paused. “Still, there’s nothing I can think of in the Internet’s TCP/IP or OSI model that could produce cellular automata. I wonder where they’re coming from?”

  “Lost packets,” Caitlin said suddenly, sitting up straighter.

  Kuroda sounded both intrigued and impressed. “Could be.”

  At any moment, Caitlin knew, hundreds of millions of people are using the Internet. While doing so, their computers send out clusters of bits called data packets — the basic unit of communication on the Web. Each packet contains the address of its intended destination, which might, for instance, be the server hosting a webpage. But traffic on the Web almost never goes directly from point A to point B. Instead, it bounces around on multi-legged journeys, passing through routers, repeaters, and switches, each of which tries to direct the packet closer to its intended destination.

  Sometimes the routing gets awfully complex, especially when packets are rejected by the place they were sent to. That can happen when two or more packets arrive at the same time: one is chosen at random to be accepted and the others are sent back out to try their luck again later. But some packets never get accepted by their intended destinations because the address they’ve been sent to is invalid, or the target site is down or too busy, and so they end up being lost.

  “Lost packets,” repeated Kuroda, as if trying the notion on for size. Caitlin imagined he was shaking his head. “But lost packets just expire.”

  And indeed they mostly do, she knew: each packet has a “hop counter” coded into it, and that counter is reduced by one every time the packet passes through a router or other device. To keep lost packets from clogging up the Web infrastructure, when a router receives a packet whose hop counter has reached zero, it erases the packet.

  “Lost packets are supposed to expire,” Caitlin corrected, “but what if the packet is corrupted so that it no longer has a hop counter, or that counter doesn’t decrement properly? I imagine some portion of packets get corrupted like that, by faulty routers or bad wiring or buggy software, and, with trillions of them going out each day, even if only a very tiny proportion ended up with broken hop counters, that would still leave huge numbers kicking around forever, right? Especially if their intended destination simply doesn’t exist, either because the address has been corrupted along with the hop counter, or the server has gone offline.”

  “You know a lot about networks,” Kuroda said, sounding impressed.

  “Hey, who do you think set up the one in this house?”

  “I’d assume your father…”

  “Oh, he’s good at networking now,” she said. “I taught him. But really, he’s a theoretical physicist. He can barely operate the microwave.”

  Kuroda’s chair squeaked. “Ah.”

  She felt herself getting excited; she was on to something — she knew it!

  “Anyway, there are probably always some … some ghost packets that persist long after they should have died. And think about that thing that happened in China recently: a huge, huge portion of the Web was cut off because of those power failures, or whatever. Hundreds of trillions of packets intended for China suddenly had no way to get to their destinations. Even if only a tiny fraction of those got suitably corrupted, it would still mean a huge increase in the number of ghost packets.”

  “‘Ghost packets,’ eh?” Kuroda had brought a cup of coffee downstairs with him, and she heard it clatter; he must have just taken a sip. “Perhaps. Maybe a bug in some operating system or common router has been generating them for years under certain circumstances, for all we know — a benign bug that doesn’t inconvenience users might never have been noticed.”

  He shifted in his chair, then: “Or maybe they aren’t immortal packets at all. Maybe this is just the normal ebb and flow of lost packets that will expire, and while they’re bouncing around trying in vain to reach their destination their time-to-live counters do decrement normally, but it’s the switch from odd to even counts with each handoff that causes them to flip from black to white in your perception. You’d still get as many as 256 permutations out of each doomed packet — that’s the maximum number of hops that can be coded for, because packets use an eight-bit field to store that value. But that’s still a goodly number of iterations for a cellular-automata rule.”

  He paused, then blew out air noisily; Caitlin could almost hear him shrug.

  “But this is way out of my area,” he continued. “I’m an information theorist, not a network theorist, and—”

  She laughed.


  “What?” said Kuroda.

  “Sorry. Do you ever watch The Simpsons?”

  “No, not really. But my daughter does.”

  “The time Homer ended up becoming an astronaut? These two newscasters are talking about the crew of a space mission. The first guy says, ‘They’re a colorful bunch. They’ve been dubbed “The Three Musketeers,” heh heh heh.’ And the other guy — it’s Tom Brokaw — says, ‘And we laugh legitimately: there’s a mathematician, a different kind of mathematician, and a statistician.’”

  Kuroda chuckled then said, “Well, actually, there are three types of mathematicians: those who can count, and those who can’t.”

  Caitlin smiled.

  “But, seriously, Miss Caitlin, if you go into a career in maths or engineering, you will have to choose a specialty.”

  She kept her voice deadpan. “I’m going to focus on the number 8,623,721 — I bet nobody’s taken that one yet.”

  Kuroda made his wheezy chuckle again. “Still, I think we need to talk to a specialist. Let’s see, in Israel it’s … hey, it’s only 8:00 p.m. She might be around.”

  “Who? Anna?”

  “Exactly: Anna Bloom, the network cartographer. I’ll IM her to see if she’s online. Does this new computer have a webcam?”

  “I suspect my dad didn’t think I’d have much use for one,” she said gently.

  “Well, he — ah! He’s more of an optimist than you think, Miss Caitlin. There’s one right here, sitting on top of the tower.” He used the keyboard for a few moments, then: “Yup, she’s at home and online. Let me get a webcam call going…”

  “Konnichi wa, Masayuki-san!” said the same voice Caitlin had heard on the speakerphone the night she’d seen the Web for the first time. But the woman immediately switched to English, presumably when she saw that he was with a Westerner. “Hey, who’s the sweet young thing?”

  Dr. Kuroda sounded slightly embarrassed. “This is Miss Caitlin.” Of course, Anna hadn’t seen her when they’d spoken before.

  Anna sounded surprised. “Where are you?”